Iron Sharpens Iron
by Dark Caustic
Summary: Napoleon smiles over the lip of his glass. "Keep my two favorite Alphas safe in a world afraid of homosexuals?" he asks with a signature smirk. (In which Gaby and Illya are both Alphas and Napoleon helps them hide their taboo relationship. Illya/Gaby, Gaby/Napoleon, Napoleon/ Illya, Napoleon/Gaby/Illya, warnings for mpreg)


In Istanbul, Illya gives Gaby a ring that isn't bugged. It's silver and blue topaz and dazzles on her skin.

She kisses him on the cheek, next to a bruise still healing after the mission.

He knows this is a bad idea - feels it down inside his gut - but can't help it. She's captivating. Smart, headstrong and beautiful. She smells like cinnamon and summer days. He loves the way Russian sounds coming off her tongue and wants - so badly - to hear the baser noises she can make.

He knows the laws - only the Netherlands have recognized Alpha/Alpha pairings. If his KGB superiors find out, he'll be sent to Siberia. But. He hasn't checked in with them in nearly two months since Waverly now oversees them. Still. He's not sure UNCLE will be any friendlier.

At the table, Gaby admires the ring under the morning light through the window and Illya decides he doesn't care: she's worth the risk.

Behind his newspaper, Napoleon smirks but says nothing.

XxX

In Lisbon, Gaby gives Illya a heavy, wooden case for his favorite pistol. Her first courting gift and his heart trips into his throat. He never thought about having a relationship like this: egalitarian. One where he gets as well as gives. It feels like liberation.

They walk hand in hand along the coast at night and, for once in her life, Gaby is secretly grateful for her slight form - no one suspects they are both Alphas.

Back in London, Illya cooks Gaby dinner. Steak and potatoes and fine wine. She drinks till she's buzzed and compliments his food and he preens, turns pink under her praise.

They don't have sex that night, but she does spend the night, snugged up beside him, his nose buried in her hair. For days afterwards, he can still smell her on his sheets - the heavy sent of Alpha mixed with the fragrance of her shampoo.

He never saw this coming.

XxX

In Rome for a second time, two months into courting, they finally start to have sex. The mechanics of it take them nearly a month to work out - the way their bodies aren't designed to fit together. Still, he loves her more than ever when his knot doesn't fit and she just smiles and works him through with her hand.

He knows he's not supposed to - Alphas are supposed to be repulsed by the smell and taste of other Alphas - but he's anything but. She tastes like a cold drink after a day in the sun and he loves the way she vibrates to completion on his tongue, her hand tight in his hair (so much strength in that grip) and her thighs almost deadly around his ears.

He can't get enough of her.

XxX

Six months in, they warily accept a mission that sends them back over the Iron Curtain. He has to call Oleg and let them know they're working in his territory. He doesn't sound happy but allows it.

The safe house they're in has two bedrooms and a couch. Illya and Gaby file into the room with the bigger bed while Napoleon takes the near closet sized room across from the kitchen.

They're woken to Solo shaking them out of bed shortly before the crack of dawn.

"Listen to me," he says, pulling Gaby up from the blankets and thrusting her pajamas into her hands. "Go lie down in my room. Trust me, there's not much time," he says.

He reeks of omega slick like he's recently been fucked (or masturbating) as he climbs into the disheveled sheets still warm from Gaby's form.

He rolls over till he's against Illya's chest and it's startling, but somehow not unwelcome.

It's only three minutes later they're roused again by Oleg himself and Illya gets it.

He looks disgusted to find his agent in bed with an American but Napoleon being an Omega brings only mild disgust that he would defile himself with a capitalist, rather than a ticket to the next train north if he'd found Illya with another Alpha in his bed.

XxX

It takes him six days after the mission end to find a way to say thank you. They're at their office in London and Illya brings Solo a cup of coffee and leaves it on his desk, doesn't make eye contact as he sits at his own desk to finish paperwork, clears his throat and says, "What you did - in Russia," he has trouble with the words but Napoleon carefully picks up the mug and takes a long, slow slip looking right at him.

He sets the cup down and says, "Don't mention it."

XxX

Another three days pass before they all go out to dinner before retiring to the London safe house for the night.

Gaby pours the wine and then doesn't pull the punch when she asks, "What you did before, would you be interested in doing it again? Doing it more?"

Napoleon smiles over the lip of his glass. "Keep my two favorite Alphas safe in a world afraid of homosexuals?" he asks with a signature smirk.

Illya blushes at it being put so bluntly but Gaby holds firm and says, "Yes."

Napoleon drinks half his glass before setting it down. "You realize if I don't start to smell like one - or both - of you, people will get suspicious?"

"That's why we're having this conversation. Just because we love each other does not mean we don't like Omegas. It doesn't mean we don't find you attractive, Solo."

He smiles, shit-eating and bright and says, "Wanted to hear it from the horses mouth. Are you all right with this arrangement, Illya?" he asks. "I don't want any part of it if you're not both one hundred precent on this."

It's Illya's turn to smirk as he gives Napoleon's body a once over, very slowly, something feral and dominate in his eyes as he folds his arms over his chest and says, "I am more than one hundred precent."

Illya fucks him half way into next week the following morning.

His knot is as big as the rest of him and Napoleon almost walks funny afterwards.

When Gaby works him through the worst of his heat the following month, he lays splayed out and sated on the sheets and decides that Illya and Gaby falling in love is the best thing to ever happen to him.

XxX

It doesn't come without its downs, though.

A smeared mating mark appears on Gaby's shoulder a year into the ordeal. She won't stop worrying it in the mirror, her face turned down and sometimes Napoleon catches her eyes glistening with unshed tears. The mark doesn't take and within a matter of weeks, she can wear sleeveless dresses again.

They don't share a bed for nearly two weeks after that - none of them - conversation is stilted and every meal feels like it's been served cold.

It's Napoleon's turn to stay up and keep guard at the cabin in Switzerland they're laying low in when he hears Illya sneak out of his room and down the hall into Gaby's.

Their voices are gentle, too quiet for him to make out their words, but by the morning, things start to feel right again.

XxX

When his next heat starts to set in, he notices that Illya starts to touch Gaby more. She tolerates it at first, but two days into his sudden need to have his hands on her at all times and she snaps. She has an Alpha like rage that can match Illya's at times.

Napoleon requests time off, spends his heat locked up in a hotel room in Paris, leaving only once to pick up a nameless, male beta he fucks on every surface of the room.

XxX

Gaby buries her hands in Illya's hair as he presses kisses across her taut stomach. It took practice for her body to take his knot, for him to not hurt at the clench of her cunt (her inverse knot), till they could make love like any Alpha/Omega or Beta couple.

But that didn't mean their bodies were compatible.

"I don't actually want a child," he says into her navel.

"I know," she says, raking her nails across his scalp. He arches into it like a cat and breathes in deep at her hairline, after all this time, still addicted to the smell of her.

"I don't know why it bothers me," he says.

"Instinct," she replies. And she's right.

XxX

The apartment in Greece overlooks the sea and Napoleon tans better than either of them would have expected. He looks statuesque and handsome and they take turns with him and each other in both bedrooms in the apartment.

When Waverly shows up unannounced with new intel, he takes in the state of disarray of both the rooms and the three of them and arches an eyebrow but doesn't say a word until he's just about to leave, when he turns and looks at Napoleon and says, "Just make sure this doesn't go south. You are my most affective agents. I would hate for an Alpha rivalry to be your downfall."

They laugh once he's gone, he's none the wiser and their plan is working.

Or so they think.

XxX

Napoleon is distant on the mission in Buenos Aires. Something is wrong but he won't say what. He closes the door to his room at night and doesn't bed either of them.

As soon as everything is wrapped up, he goes missing.

It takes Illya nine days to track him to a house in the suburbs of New Jersey.

Gaby waits in the hotel room while Illya goes to talk to him.

He doesn't answer the door. A sturdy omega woman, clearly pushing seventy, answers and as soon as she takes in Illya, sets her face to stone.

"You must be the Alpha who knocked up my son," she says curtly.

Illya's stomach drops out and he says, "What?" in Russian before correcting himself to, "Excuse me?" in English.

"I haven't seen Napoleon in over twenty years," she says. "He turns up unannounced a week ago and insists on moving into my spare room. I'm not an idiot - there's only one reason an unwed Omega returns to his mother's house out of blue. Someone's put him in the family way and refused to make him family."

"That's not what—," Illya starts but cuts himself off. Mrs. Solo's steely gaze shuts him down. "Please tell Napoleon I would like to speak with him," he says and tells her he'll wait at the diner a few blocks away if Napoleon wants to come talk to him.

He calls Gaby from a pay phone to tell her what's happened. She's quiet on the other end of the line before saying, "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know," Illya responds.

XxX

He waits at an uncomfortable booth for nearly four hours, watching happy families eat meals, come and go. Beautiful beta girls on dates with handsome young beta men. Omega mothers helping their children eat, Alpha men drinking coffee alone at the counter.

He thinks about how he'd never thought he'd be here - in America, in love with another Alpha, working for anyone other than the KGB. How life unfolds in ways he never expected.

Napoleon does show up. Dressed as immaculately as ever but there's a frailty to him now. He's more bravado than actual bravery.

He sits across from Illya and forces a tiny smile.

"Napoleon," Illya says.

"I keep thinking about that story by Hemingway," Napoleon says, cutting the Alpha off. "You know - the one about the Alpha man and his Omega girlfriend in Spain? They sit and drink coffee and look at the hills and he keeps telling her that it's just a puff of air."

Illya is too dumbstruck to speak for a moment. "I am not familiar," he admits.

Napoleon shrugs. "I was going to go to this doctor I know, who handles these sorts of things. Get it taken care of. Not let you or Gaby or Waverly be the wiser, but, when it came time, I found myself on my mother's doorstep instead and I'm not entirely sure how I got there."

Illya wants to touch him, wants to comfort him. But it's not like it is with Gaby - it's like wanting to stay with a fellow soldier who's been injured. It's more platonic than he feels about Gaby but it's still sharp and intense and drives home the sickening idea that him and Gaby are unnatural because an Alpha can't bear another Alpha's children and here is Solo, who they only wanted to use for his scent, to keep them from getting caught, carrying Illya's child and it's all so messed up.

"I don't want to raise a kid," Napoleon says. "But that doesn't mean I can bring myself to kill yours."

Illya doesn't have a response to that. All he can think about is Gaby's smooth stomach and a string of things that will never happen.

XxX

Mrs. Solo lets Gaby into the house when she comes to visit the next day. Napoleon hasn't even gotten out of his pajamas, sitting on the back porch staring out at the lawn and saying nothing.

"I've spoken to Waverly," Gaby says when she sits beside him.

Napoleon does her the justice of grunting to acknowledge her.

"I told him you weren't feeling yourself. He's given us some time off," she says.

"I really don't care," Napoleon says.

"Maybe not. But Sanders does."

Napoleon looks at her then. "Are you blackmailing me?"

"No. I'm trying to take care of you."

"You're not my Alpha. You don't have to take care of me."

"Napoleon, just— just let us help. Please."

It's several more days of pleading and some uncomfortable conversations between Illya and Mrs. Solo before Napoleon agrees to return to London with them.

XxX

It's simple. Waverly gives him a desk job while he's pregnant, and, after he delivers, the baby goes up for adoption.

It's supposed to be closed - but Gaby and Illya are spies at heart and make sure the family is good. And they are good. Protestant, middle-class, the father's a banker and the mother stays at home. She's a barren beta and he's an omega who didn't want to carry.

The months pass painfully slowly. Without Napoleon covering for them, Illya and Gaby make love less.

She stops wearing the ring he gave her and he finds traveling with the case for his pistol to be impractical.

It's not over. It's just… quieter.

And slightly jaded, perhaps.

When the KGB recalls Illya a year later, he goes wordlessly, but with a mating mark that won't last blooming fiercely on his neck and a silver and topaz ring in his pocket.

Gaby applies for citizenship in the Netherlands with a bugged pearl on her finger and a Russian handgun hidden in the false bottom of her suitcase.

And Solo…

Well.

On some Sundays, Solo can be found sitting on a bench in a quiet park in London, watching a small family feed the ducks.

The child - a girl - looks just like her father.

XxX

(A/N: Title from Sixteen Horse Power's song "Hutterite Mile." And the story Napoleon references is "Hills like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway.)


End file.
